


Never Ever Have I Ever

by Trojie



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Crossdressing, Drinking Games, Fellatio, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Threesome - M/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-03
Updated: 2011-04-03
Packaged: 2017-10-17 11:53:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/176607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/pseuds/Trojie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gwaine and Merlin change schools to Camelot College after Ealdor College is shut down, and they take their dare challenge with them.</p><p>Written for yue_ix in the LJ High School Merlin exchange. See notes re: character age.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Ever Have I Ever

**Author's Note:**

> Everyone is seventeen or eighteen, and in NZ the legal age for sex is 16 and drinking is 18, so while there's a bit of underage drinking (which is not at all uncommon in NZ), all naughty shenanigans are legal. A teeny tiny glossary is included at the end for words that got picked up as incomprehensible to non-Kiwis during betareading/audiencing. Thanks to Isisanubis for the beta and Organisedcure for the extremely helpful audiencing!

The skirt thing was never meant to be a thing, not really.

It's just they had this running dare challenge at Ealdor, which started when they were in third form, and by seventh form, after a few unplanned pregnancies and a few people deciding that a mechanic's apprenticeship looked more exciting than calculus, Merlin and Gwaine were the only two left in their year group, so the dare thing suddenly became this matter of life and death, because they only had each other to compete against and honour must be satisfied, y'know?

And then Ealdor got shut down because apparently it's stupid to have a whole school with only fifteen kids in it, and Merlin and Gwaine got sent to Camelot College instead.

At Camelot, they're only two of eight hundred students, and there's a uniform. Oh boy, is there a uniform. And that's how Merlin got his idea, and that's how the whole thing started.

***

'You can't be serious.'

'I thought you said you were game for anything, Cromarty.'

'Yeah, I am, but seriously dude, not even the _girls_ at this school wear the skirts. I am not doing that.'

'Well, if you're not _man_ enough ..' Merlin says tauntingly, dangling the little tartan skirt in front of Gwaine's face.

Gwaine snatches it. 'Fuck you, Emrys.' But he ruins the appearance of anger by poking his tongue out and flouncing theatrically off to the bathroom to change. Merlin kind of wishes he'd stay here to change, but he can't actually say that out loud. So instead he sits back on Gwaine's stupidly huge bed and waits. This should be good.

When Gwaine reappears, Merlin's mouth goes dry. Gwaine's fiddling with the tie, which is another thing they never had at Ealdor, but right now Merlin's interest is mostly piqued by the tiny skirt. Gwaine may be slender enough to get into a girl's skirt but he's tall, and the thing only comes to halfway down his thighs. He passes Merlin in order to get to the full-length mirror hanging on his wardrobe door (this room used to belong to Gwaine's older sister before she moved out), and stares at himself.

'Fuck, do you know how to tie one of these things?' he asks, and Merlin is across the room like a shot.

Unfortunately, he's only used to tying a tie on himself. Staring hard at Gwaine's throat and trying to work it out doesn't work very well. 'Turn around,' he says after several minutes of exasperating entanglements, and Gwaine does so suspiciously obediently. This leads to Merlin standing behind Gwaine in front of a full-length mirror.

Merlin licks his lips.

'Get on with it, then,' says Gwaine, but his voice is a little scratchy. Merlin ties the tie, not his best work, and then stays there … just sort of looking. Gwaine makes a noise in the back of his throat and then sort of pushes his arse back against Merlin, and fuck, he must feel that Merlin's getting hard from this, and Merlin freezes a little in panic.

Gwaine's hand comes up and pries Merlin's fingers free from his tie, and draws them down to press against … the bulge under the skirt.

'C'mon Emrys,' he says, his eyes huge in the mirror. 'Man enough?'

The Skirt Thing gets christened on the floor of Gwaine's bedroom, along with the skirt. This is still before it became a Thing, of course.

***

Camelot's okay, turns out. No major angst, except Merlin and Gwaine experience the novelty of classes without each other's company occasionally (for example, Gwaine picks up senior PE and Merlin decides he'd rather do History than run around in the sun sustaining minor injuries in a pair of embarrassingly short shorts), and Gwaine gets a lot of detentions he's adamant he doesn't deserve and Merlin's equally adamant he does, and laughs at him for.

The other students are okay as well. And by 'okay', Merlin means a combination of nice (Gwen, the girl who sits next to him in History), exasperating (Mordred, the fifth-form kid who's allowed to sit in on senior biology and asks constant fucking questions), unfairly attractive (Lance, Gwen's on-again-off-again boyfriend) and completely infuriating (Arthur, son of the headmaster, who is a combination of nice, exasperating and unfairly attractive _all at once_.)

'You liiiiiike him,' Gwaine teases Merlin sometimes when they're over at his house after school, drinking clandestine Red Bulls and half-heartedly attacking their homework. He pitches his voice high and twirls his stupid long hair between his fingers.

'Fuck off, you've got the hots for him too,' Merlin points out, stabbing at the entry on the normal distribution in his stats text as if violence will make it give up its secrets. 'You, me, and everyone else in that bloody school.'

'No harm in looking,' Gwaine says airily, dropping back into his normal voice. 'But you get all -' he pulls a crazy face and flails his arms '- over him.'

At which point Merlin, as usual, tackles him, and then they end up rolling around, and Gwaine ends up on top because of the advantages conferred by senior-PE-rather-than-History, and then the whole thing, as is typical, ends with them having their hands in each others' pants.

That's a thing now too, but just a thing. Not a Thing. They're just mates, which means Gwaine is allowed to ogle Gwen's cleavage and get punched in a gentlemanly but pointed fashion by Lance, and Merlin is allowed to ogle Arthur's arse and get caught and get a raised eyebrow from Arthur's buddy Leon.

So basically everything's pretty normal and school-like, and everyone's pretty much just waiting until exams, when all this college bullshit will be over and they can go to university (Edwin, hopefully, if he gets the A bursary he's gunning for) or become mechanics (Gwen's brother Elyan, who has this souped-up Nissan Bluebird that he seriously loves more than he loves anything else in the world) or be completely undecided about their lives and continue to live in their parents' houses (Merlin and Gwaine, most likely) like normal adults.

Until The Announcement. Merlin tries not to assign mental capital letters to things unless they're actually important, but he figures this counts.

Turns out, they have this teamwork exercise bullshit at Camelot for the seventh-formers, in the form of a camp. They're going to get hauled out to somewhere outdoorsy for a week and hike and climb and run and swim and generally get forced to bond with each other through adversity. Gwaine laps it up and looks exceedingly keen for someone who hates the bourgeois autocratic systems of enforced education (Merlin swears he's either not using most of those words right or he just made them all up). Merlin hates the very idea.

He also hates his room assignment in the lodge they're staying in. He's roomed with Arthur. Ogle-able Arthur, the prat.

At the beginning of the week, on Sunday night, it's as awful as he imagined.

'I always have the top bunk,' Arthur says, regarding Merlin's bags with what Merlin thinks of as a jaundiced eye (goddamn English poetry assignment, he's never going to get _bloody Tennyson_ out of his head).

'Well, not this time,' Merlin retorts. 'I was here first.'

He wins that one, because Arthur can't come up with good reason to switch. But that's about the only thing he does win. He spends the entire week, it seems, trailing Arthur around, because they're supposed to stick with their buddies. They go round Lake Rotopounamu, with Merlin getting sand in his trainers and his clothes soaked because Arthur decides to give him a dunking in the name of 'good old-fashioned fun' at the lunch-stop. They do the Tongariro Crossing, and Merlin ends up carrying Arthur's pack for twenty minutes while the prat tries to skid down the scree-slope above Emerald Lakes.

But then again, Arthur claps Merlin on the back, ruffles his hair, saves him an extra helping of pudding one night. It feels like they're mates sometimes, just little flashes of it through the days, and despite Gwaine's teasing about Merlin having the hots for Arthur, he'd really rather have a friend. He's kind of sick of being the new kid. It's been months since the school year started, and yet he's still one of those two from Ealdor, yeah, that college that got shut down.

He knows he can't really get in on friendships that were formed in primary school, but it would be nice to just be accepted as one of the Camelot students. So he ignores Gwaine's little digs about being Arthur's servant, although after one too many little jokes about being a girl he drags Gwaine around the back of the cookhouse and pins him to the wall and grinds against him until they both come in their pants, just to prove he's as much man as Gwaine is.

'So I guess you won't be wanting this then,' Gwaine says after that, when they're both slumped, panting and flushed and grinning, up against the back wall they've just defiled.

'Want what?' Merlin asks, without really thinking about it.

Gwaine drags at the backpack he'd been wearing before Merlin decided to have his wicked way with him, and digs inside it, to produce a corner of blue-and-red tartan. Merlin feels his eyes go as round as saucers. 'Why did you bring that?' he demands.

'Thought it could be fun,' Gwaine says offhandedly, shoving it back into his pack.

'And why did you take it hiking?' Merlin asks.

'Oh, y'know,' says Gwaine airily. 'You never know when someone might need a dare.'

'You're a madman,' Merlin says wonderingly.

Gwaine grins. 'Fuck off, Emrys, you love it.'

'Do not.'

'Do too.'

It goes on like that until the dinner-bell sounds, and then they both get assigned to do the dishes as a punishment for being late.

***

It's funny how much easier it is to talk to someone when the lights are out and you're pretending to go to sleep. Merlin and Arthur shoot the shit for hours in whispers - sort of awkward and uncomfortable in places, but they can't stop talking. Merlin finds out about Arthur's mum dying when he was little, and his dad being really uptight. In turn he tells Arthur about how he never knew his dad and how his mum basically lets him get away with whatever he likes.

And when the conversation looks like it might start turning to girls, which is not Merlin's best subject (girls: They're okay. The idea of getting his hands in _their_ pants as opposed to, say, Gwaine's, is sort of terrifying though. He's not really sure he's interested), Arthur suddenly says, 'You and Gwaine …'

'Me and Gwaine what?' Merlin asks, stiffening under his blankets (and not in the good way, either).

'Are you …' Arthur lets it trail off. Merlin knows what he means.

'Um.'

'I wouldn't care,' Arthur says hurriedly. 'I mean, I'm cool with that, y'know, that's not why I'm ....'

'He's my mate,' Merlin says, which is all the explanation he really has, and it's not going to drop him in the shit, which is what he's worried about. Arthur doesn't seem like the type to, but there are people out there who'd say, they're cool with that, and then two days later Merlin's getting beaten up behind the marae for being a faggot. 'That's all.'

'Oh, good,' Arthur says, sounding weirdly relieved. Merlin's about to ask why the fuck he cares, anyway, if he's so _cool with that_ , and then Arthur adds, 'So can you, like, hook us up?'

That … was not what Merlin was expecting.

***

'You coming, then?' Arthur asks on the last night. Merlin finished packing ages ago, and dinner's in about ten minutes.

'To dinner? Gimme a sec,' Merlin says, yanking some socks on. He's sitting on Arthur's bunk, because there are no chairs in their cabin, and Arthur sits down next to him.

'No, idiot. After that.'

'Coming to what?'

'Oh, a few of us were gonna get together in Leon's cabin and have a bit of a party,' Arthur says off-handedly. His eyes gleam, and he adds, 'You could bring Gwaine.'

Arthur's apparent crush on Gwaine still has Merlin pole-axed, and kinda jealous, and he hesitates, still in the process of yanking on a sock. Arthur, with a bit of a smirk slides over. Merlin can smell booze on his breath, just a hint. They're obviously not supposed to be drinking, but Arthur's eighteen, which means he can buy the stuff.

Arthur slides an arm around Merlin's waist and squeezes. 'I'll make it worth your while,' he says in a very obvious tone of voice, and Merlin suddenly decides he _fucking loves_ seventh form camp.

***

Everyone is half-cut by eight o clock, and by nine o clock they're playing Never Ever Have I Ever, sitting bonelessly cross-legged on the floor of Leon and Percival's cabin. Merlin isn't a heavy drinker at the best of times, and what he _thinks_ is vodka out of a scungy H2GO bottle is kind of knocking him a bit, but he has a good solid dinner of chops and potatoes in him, so it's not like his judgement is that impaired.

'Okay okay okay okay _okay_ ,' Arthur says, holding up a finger. 'Never ever have I ever … pashed a guy.'

Gwen, Morgana, Freya, and all the other girls in the room make snorting noises and take gulps from their bottles. As does Merlin. And Gwaine. (And, interestingly, Leon, but none of the others take much notice of that.)

Okay so maybe Merlin's judgement is a _little_ impaired.

'Duuuuuuude,' says Elyan, and punches Gwaine in the arm in what Merlin thinks is probably a congratulatory manner. Off a weird look from Edwin, he says, 'What? They'd be hot together.'

'We … might not be talking about each other,' Merlin says lamely. Elyan snorts. Merlin wants the ground to open up and swallow him. Arthur grabs the bottle again and spins it roughly. It lands on Merlin, because of course that's just how shit his life is right now.

And then he remembers what Gwaine's got in his bag, and that triggers an idea in the probably-vodka-filled recesses of his brain. 'Never ever have I ever,' he begins, and takes another swig to fortify himself, 'worn a skirt.'

The girls, again, groan. Morgana throws a pillow at Merlin, and they all dutifully drink. 'I swear, the next one better be interesting for someone who isn't a ragingly gay guy,' Gwen says, 'Or all us girls are going to go to the showers and none of you will be allowed to come with us.'

This causes a bit of pandemonium, particularly amongst Lancelot and Percival, but despite that fact, no-one misses Arthur taking a big hearty swig of whatever the shit he's drinking is. (Gwaine drinks too, but Merlin _knew_ about Gwaine and the skirt, so he's less interested in that.)

'Oh _really_ ,' says Morgana evilly (she's Arthur's step-sister, they're always trying to get one over on each other.) 'And when was this?'

'None of your damn business,' Arthur retorts. 'C'mon, someone else's go.'

It turns out that never ever has Morgana ever crushed on a teacher (but Percival has), and never ever has Leon ever gone skinny-dipping (but basically everyone else in the room has), and never ever has Lancelot ever cheated (but Merlin spots Gwen fiddling with her bottle in a guilty-looking way, which is _interesting_ ).

As the night wears on the teachers get more and more insistent with their torches and their banging on the door, and eventually everyone buggers off back to their own cabins to sleep off the tipsiness. Arthur and Merlin drag Gwaine back to theirs though, because. Well. Mostly because if they'd stayed on Leon and Percival's floor with Gwaine's hands in Merlin's pants and Arthur's mouth all over Gwaine's neck, they would have been stood on at some point in the night by Percival, who must be the second cousin of an elephant or something because, shit, he's a big guy. Also Leon apparently doesn't approve of orgies on his floor while he's trying to sleep. He made a point of saying so three times before Arthur got exasperated with him and said 'Fine then,' and they all dragged themselves up and out the door.

Merlin knows the cabin isn't far away, but he can also hear the snuffling of the kunekune piglets in the trees and through booze they sound kind of terrifying, so he tries to shuffle Arthur and Gwaine along a bit faster, which is made harder by the fact that they're sort of eating each others' faces.

Merlin would pout but he's too busy trying to escape monster-piglets.

'So I guess I'll just go to bed, then,' he says pointedly when they get into the dark cabin (they daren't turn the light on in case it alerts teachers), because they clearly don't need his help.

'Fuck that,' says Arthur, dragging Merlin into the circle of his arms. They kind of overbalance after that, and then Gwaine is doing something esoteric to Merlin's trousers which distracts him a bit (but not much) from the fact that Arthur's mouth is hot and wet and talented. Merlin manages to extricate himself (or at least, his mouth) from Arthur long enough to ask what exactly Gwaine is doing.

'Making sure you get trashed every time you play Never Ever Have I Ever for the _rest of your life_ ,' Gwaine says, slightly muffledly. There's fabric rasping and rustling and a distinctly draughty feeling and then …

'Is that the skirt?' Merlin asks faintly before Arthur grabs him again.

'Oh, you know it, Emrys,' Gwaine growls happily somewhere in the dark. 'You know it.'

Tangled together on the floor in the dark, Merlin doesn't think the skirt is going to make that much of a difference, but once Gwaine and Arthur have both managed to get rid of what they're wearing, the feel of the wool or whatever it is sandwiched between all that naked skin is amazing, it scratches and scrapes and oversensitises.

'Never ever have I ever,' says Arthur, with his hands on Merlin's arse, 'had a threesome.'

'That's it,' says Gwaine encouragingly. 'Leave no stone unturned.'

'Never ever have _I_ ever either,' Merlin says, and rolls over so he's got Arthur pinned underneath him properly, their cocks rubbing together against each other and against the skirt. Gwaine is somewhere behind him and Merlin can feel the heat and pressure stretching up along his spine, and then … then Gwaine pulls both of them up so that Merlin is caught in the cradle of their laps, skirt flopping over everything, and Gwaine's fingers running up Merlin's throat and Arthur's hands steady on his hips.

'Never ever have I ever done _this_ ,' says Arthur, and suddenly Merlin feels fingers somewhere he's only vaguely considered fingers before, just lightly touching like Arthur kind of expects to get told to get the fuck out of there, and it's all Merlin can do to bite back the moan he feels bubbling up through his chest.

'Never ever have I ever sucked off someone who was getting fingered,' says Gwaine, who lives to be blunt sometimes. Merlin can feel the movement from Arthur's sudden intake of breath where they're pressed together.

'I don't think that one's likely to come up at a party,' says Merlin in a voice that's a little higher-pitched than he's willing to admit, letting Arthur roll him over onto his side so that he's got better … leverage, or whatever. Gwaine is sneaking down over Merlin's legs, meanwhile.

He gets his head up under the skirt, so that when he says, 'Are you saying you don't want me to?' his breath floats over Merlin's cock, which is a dirty trick.

'No,' Merlin manages before Gwaine swallows him down, and he throws his head back and moans, which gets him a bite on the neck from Arthur. Shit, Arthur. Arthur's behind him and he's suddenly got two of his fingers up against Merlin's mouth and he's whispering 'C'mon, you need to get them wet, Merlin, wet for me,' in this dark and wrecked voice, so Merlin sucks the fingers into his mouth in some kind of weird copy of what Gwaine is doing to him, and it makes him shiver with anticipation. Never ever has he ever done this, either - he and Gwaine never kind of got round to it, always kind of more interested in their cocks and what they could do with them with, like, hands and mouths and things.

'Fuck, Merlin,' Arthur says breathily behind him, and pulls his fingers free. Merlin tries to spread his legs a bit wider, but he doesn't want to knee Gwaine in the throat or anything, so it's a bit awkward.

The first press of Arthur's fingers is also awkward. Merlin isn't sure what Arthur's planning on doing, but he just touches and circles and presses a little, spreading wetness over what feels like raw fucking nerve endings, making Merlin buck helplessly into Gwaine's mouth 'til he groans, and then Arthur pulls his hand away (Merlin tries not to whimper) and from the sounds of it, spits in it, and then there's wet between Merlin's thighs, Arthur's sliding his hand down there and along Merlin's arsecrack and up to touch his balls, and how the fuck is Gwaine breathing down there?

'Please, can I,' Arthur says, and Merlin feels the first touch of Arthur's cock down there, along the slick path he's made for it, not _in_ but against in places that feel fucking amazing just from being touched by Arthur's fingers. Merlin wants that, that soft hard heat, against him any way he can get it.

All he can think to say though is, 'Never ever have I ever -'

And then Gwaine drags himself, panting, up from below the skirt and says, 'Fuck's sake, Emrys, yes or no?' with a laugh in his voice and his own cock up against Merlin's thigh and fuck, that's it, Merlin wants it all _right now_.

'Yes,' Merlin breathes, 'fuck yes,' and Arthur slides home, and Gwaine drags himself close so that he can wrap a hand around himself and Merlin at the same time, and after that none of them really last long.

They wake up in the morning and the skirt is ruined and Merlin feels _gross_ and sticky in places that should never be sticky, and somehow they have to explain Gwaine's presence in their cabin when the teachers come round to wake them up because the bus home will be here in an hour, and all in all Merlin decides, with the certainty of someone with a pounding hangover, that he hates seventh form camp.

But on the bus Gwaine falls asleep across his shoulder, and Arthur gets Merlin in a headlock and uses it as an excuse to kiss him under his ear, and he thinks maybe it wasn't that bad.

And at the end of year dinner, he gets the student award for 'Best Guy To Party With' because of that time he walked Percival home after he'd taken something the students kindly don't mention in front of the teachers, and it had taken three hours and Percy'd been sick twice (and it'd looked like highlighter fluid, seriously, it was fluorescent yellow), and he thinks maybe Camelot College hasn't been that bad either, overall.

And years later, when he gets Christmas cards from Gwen and Lance and goes out for New Year's with Gwaine and Arthur and maybe (probably. Definitely) they're going to end up at someone's flat all tangled up in each other, he thinks back on the Skirt Thing with a lot of fondness for starting it all, this friendship they have that means they can do this. That means this thing of theirs works despite Arthur's horrendous girlfriends and horrendous breakups, and despite Gwaine's habit of picking up randoms from bars, and despite Merlin's complete inability to have a functioning monogamous relationship. It's not a Thing, it's just a thing. And they all like it that way.

But Merlin never plays Never Ever Have I Ever ever again.

**Author's Note:**

> TEENY TINY GLOSSARY AND NOTES:
> 
> Bursary: NZ senior exam system pre-2003. A result of an A or a B average won you a small monetary award. If you were really really smart you could do Scholarship level classes.
> 
> Forms: In college, the youngest class is technically Year Nine (13-14 year olds), but because old habits die hard, the older system was still commonly used when I was at school. Under that system, the youngest class is the third form, and the oldest is the seventh form.
> 
> Marae: Technically refers to the land on which a Maori meeting house or wharenui is built, usually used to just refer to the wharenui and any other associated buildings.
> 
> Pash: French kiss
> 
> I chose to set this in NZ high school because, hey, I went to high school in NZ and it's the only system I'm familiar with. I hope it isn't so unfamiliar as to be confusing to anyone who went to high school elsewhere!


End file.
